If you take a look at Hotplate’s LinkedIn, YCombinator company profile, or our jobs page, you can see that we are a small team compared to our revenue. Broadly, I want to keep it that way.

Having a select few high-performing, high ownership people that work well together and enable each other to grow and succeed is an amazing environment to work in. Knowing that you, and those you work with, are all incredibly effective, reliable, and impactful is one of the most empowering places I can imagine. I think all companies try to do this, but over time this ideal gets eroded.

If you slip into the easy mindset that more people can solve more problems, in almost no time at all you can find that you have a massive team, each boxed into their own corner, and all constrained by a complex and unmanageable structure of internal bureaucracy with little to no true sense of ownership. This is something I very much want to avoid at all costs as Hotplate grows. More people do not solve more problems; smart, driven people solve more problems. On top of that, we think its just more fun to work at a place where you can know the names of everyone you work with.

This means that every person that joins Hotplate is expected to have a strong drive to get things done, and have the independent and self-driven mindset to do so. This comes with potential trade offs. We all work in-person in our San Francisco office, work damn hard, and take our mission and jobs very seriously. It also means that we work in a pretty scrappy way, without the comfy guardrails larger companies may have.

If this sounds like an environment you want to work in, we would love for you to apply on our jobs page!